I went to two banks the other day. The interest rates on interest checking, or short-term savings, or money market accounts (without tying money up for a half year or so) were all below 1%. In my lifetime of some 56 years, I cannot recall lower rates. I just refinanced last fall a loan at 4.8%. Two observations. That is quite a spread of profitability for banks; and, two, given inflation at 2-3%, it seems better to borrow than to save. For conservative, thrifty retirees, worried about the mercurial stock market in the post-2008 days and post-real estate crash age, there is essentially little income to be had from their savings. I don’t follow the inter-workings of either the Federal Reserve or the Treasury Department, but as an historian I note only that we are in a cycle in which debt trumps capital, and we are witnessing an enormous redistribution of wealth far beyond the implications of new tax policies. Interest income on savings simply has ceased to exist for millions — leading to profits for banks, and essentially cheap money (the interest rate minus inflation) for debtors. Was this an artifact of the recession or a planned act, and have we seen anything quite like it in recent memory?

Dead on accurate and not at all what Barack Obama has preached. To Obama, “spreading the wealth around” means transferring money from the people that the President promised to help to the financial and energy institutions that helped get him elected.

How could such nastiness be true and the people not know?

VDH points out a telling dishonesty in the difference between the way in which the media portrayed identical behaviors during the Bush versus Obama administrations.

Right wingers in bed with Wall Street oligarchs greedily crafting federal policy for the exploiting class; Obama for some odd reason, no doubt in the end a noble reason, taking more money from the likes of Goldman Sachs and British Petroleum than any politician in history.

So the mighty savior to the little people, the spreader-of-wealth to the oppressed, is actually pushing Federal Reserve and overall Treasury Department policies that remove wealth from the little people (due to near-zero savings interest rates) and spread the wealth to the corporate entities that donated most to the savior’s presidential campaign.

The messiah wears no clothes. But the ideologically complicit media will never show the naked body to the people.

George Will nails it, sort of: "Liberalism preaches confident social engineering by the regulatory state. Conservatism urges government humility in the face of society’s creative complexity." Replace "Conservatism" with "Libertarianism" and Will's statement would be far truer.

Robert Brice: "...China's emissions jumped by 123% over the past decade and now exceed those of the U.S. by more than two billion tons per year. ...over the past decade, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions—about 6.1 billion tons per year—could have gone to zero and yet global emissions still would have gone up." So it seems that for many radical enviro-nuts, driving America back into the Stone Age is pretty much the goal.

Perhaps the most effect Don Boudreaux article ever: "[Barack Obama] knows no more about the economic matters upon which he pronounces than does a soap-opera actor portraying a physician know about cardiology or obstetrics."

Victor Davis Hanson: "After Obama, Americans will not be fooled for a generation or so into thinking that a Harvard PhD or Berkeley professor “really” knows that borrowing is prosperity, that gas should cost as much as it does in Europe, and that the more we pay millions to regulate, the more the vastly fewer who produce make us all prosperous."

Ron Paul’s foreign policy fallacies
Ron Paul is once again popping off from the hip, using false contentions as ammunition. Focus on fallacies 2, 3, and 4. Weinstein's fallacy #1 is actually a factual statement.